


Lost and Found

by tielan



Series: Meeting Halfway [25]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 30 days of OTP, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:26:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28913826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: As it starts to sink in that they've won the Battle of Wakanda, an odd thought pings against Steve's brain: Tony has a daughter.
Relationships: Maria Hill/Steve Rogers
Series: Meeting Halfway [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/30267
Comments: 9
Kudos: 73





	Lost and Found

**Author's Note:**

> 30 Days of OTP - Day 24 'Making up'.

As it starts to sink in that they've won the Battle of Wakanda, an odd thought pings against Steve's brain.

Tony has a _daughter_.

He doesn't know where the thought comes from and has no chance to ask the question in the hours that follow - hours of cleaning up and filling in, hours of catching up and congratulating, hours of feeling like there's something missing, something not-quite-right about this battle's success.

They defeated Thanos before he could destroy the world.

What's not right about that?

Yet something twists in him when Nat comes up alongside him. "All good, Steve?"

He lets his gaze rest on her for a few moments. The short blonde hair seems wrong, although it's been blonde for the better part of two years...hasn't it? And there's something almost luminous in her eyes, a knowledge that goes deeper and further and harder than her usual knowingness.

It takes him a moment to reply. "Yes." Then, stronger, "Yeah. It's good."

The brush of her hand over his arm isn't sexual in any way, but something shudders down his spine - a sensation of loss, the sudden urge to grab Nat and check that she's real. He watches as she walks over to where Bruce and Tony and the magician-guy in the swirling red cloak that seems to have a mind of his own, and says something to the three. Bruce stares, Tony nods, and the magician guy asks a question, which Nat answers in the affirmative, then taps her earpiece to contact someone.

Thor draws alongside Steve. "Something has changed."

Steve looks at him, feeling the truth of that statement like an anchor in his soul. "It's like everything's just a little out of place."

"The world shifted before I killed Thanos." Thor says it with certainty. "I thought, for a moment, that... There were women. Natasha and General Okoye...and others. Pepper Potts. The Valkyrie... They were here for the blink of an eye and then they were not."

"The Valkyrie?"

"A woman of my people - the last Valkyrie of Asgard. Fearless. Bold. You would like her." Thor shakes himself. "But the one who spoke to me-- She was...different. Very old and very young, all at once. White-skinned and bald, and, I think, human. She told me..."

"' _Aim for the head..._ '" Steve remembers the words rising through the air as he tried to make sense of his fall, of the feeling that the world had somehow shifted.

"Yes." Blue eyes light up. "You saw?"

"No, but I heard--"

Steve pauses as whatever discussion is happening between Nat, Tony, Bruce, and the magician is resolved, and the magician steps back and draws a circle of fire through the air.

Steve's at the wrong angle to see where it goes, but after a few moments, Nick Fury walks through as casually as if he strolls through a fiery ring from one location to another every day of the year. Four Wakandans follow him, dressed in Western clothing, and half a step behind them, speaking with a fifth Wakandan--

Her gaze sweeps the glade. And if it hitches when she reaches him, it's the only reaction he gets from her before she nods in acknowledgement of him and Thor. Nat calls her over with a faint smile.

Steve watches as Nat's hand grips Maria's upper arm, the thumb pressing into the fabric, as though she's checking that Maria's really there. She earns a surprised eyebrow from Maria, and returns a half-rueful smile. Then the two of them head off, following the Wakandans who are heading for command centre.

Maria doesn't look back at Steve.

_I guess I'll see you the next time the world needs saving._

It's not rational, not after she dumped him and walked away, but it doesn't have to be. Not right now when his whole body is tensed with something dangerously close to need - a different sort of urge to the brief desire to check that Nat was real, but just as fierce and somehow all the more terrifying.

Thor is looking at him oddly. "You and Maria?"

"No. Not anymore." Steve exhales. "It ended five yea-- Six months ago. Six months. It was after you left." He grimaces. "I don't know why I said five years."

"I also have five years fixed in my mind," Thor says sharply. "And memories that...cannot be true. Not if we stand here and Thanos is defeated."

Steve looks at his friend. "Thanos wasn't defeated last time."

Even as he says the words, they feel right. They feel _true_. And what does that mean?

"That is what I...' _remember_ ' is the wrong word for it," Thor says grimly. "But we...lost? And we could not make it right."

"Only, we obviously did win and yet..."

"Yes." Thor eyes him in sharp question. "And yet... I have it in mind also that Stark is a father?"

Alarm bells are ringing in Steve's head now. How would Thor alight on that thought so easily? His gaze follows Maria and Fury and the Wakandans. "Something's going on."

\--

Thor goes looking for Nat. She won't suspect him of subterfuge or trickery - not at first, anyway.

Steve goes looking for Okoye. As he does, little fragments come back to him. They're not memories because they didn't happen, but he's pretty sure they're still real. Five years. Half a universe destroyed by Thanos. Three billion people on Earth vanished. And...

"Hey, Steve." Bucky grabs him by the shoulder on the way past. "Where's the fire?"

"Bucky--"

He stops because doesn't have the words to explain what's in him at this moment. Because he wants to grab the friend he rescued and feels like he hasn't seen forever and sit down and really talk where there isn't a crisis happening. But there's too much in his head, too much that needs processing, and for a moment he sees Bucky staring at his hand as it sifts into nothing--

"Hey." The grip on his shoulder is tight and exactly what Steve needs to bring himself back to the situation. "What's up?"

"I... I can't explain."

Luckily, Buck's known him long enough to hear what's in his voice. The hand grips tighter for a moment - to the point of pain - then he stands back. "All right. But I'm gonna find you later, okay?"

"Hey, that's my line," Steve quips lightly.

He grips Bucky's shoulder, feeling metal soften and flex beneath his fingers, and as he turns away, he wonders if his friend will keep the Wakandan-made arm. Apparently the Princess Shuri designed and developed it specifically for him, and if Steve was in a teasing mood and thought that he'd get an answer, he'd ask what was going on there.

Steve's not in a teasing mood.

He finds Okoye speaking with Maria in the shadow of one of the transports - not quite hidden away, but not out in the open either.

Okoye is talking very fast, her voice low and her expression fierce, and Maria is listening very intently.

Steve checks, but Maria's gaze has already flicked to him, and her expression shifts subtly to a forbidding politeness that Steve used to think was her 'Deputy Director Maria Hill Who Is Busy Right Now, What Do You Want, Make It Fast' look. Now, he knows it for her 'This Is Not A Conversation I Want To Have Right Now' look.

Except that she's not the one he wants to have the conversation with - at least, not yet.

"Maria," he says, then turns to Okoye. "General."

"Captain Rogers," Okoye says with a careful neutrality. "How can I be of assistance?"

"You can tell me what's going on," he says, straight out. No point in beating around the bush. Thor said he saw Okoye in the moment before he killed Thanos; whatever it is that's going on, she's in it, too.

The dark face is polite and unrevealing. "Going on?"

"Five years," he says. "We... We lost the world the first time. The last time. We lost." It shudders through him as he looks at Maria: the desperation, the disbelief, the grief and guilt and struggle of five years. Was it easier because this was the second time he'd lost his world? Or worse because he'd just started to accept that this was his time, his place, the people he was going to live among? He's not sure he remembers anymore. He looks back to Okoye.

"Half the world - half the _universe._ Thanos won and we had to rebuild, only--"

Only they couldn't. They didn't have the resources - not the physical resources, not the emotional ones. What they could scrape together was barely enough to manage. And when the opportunity to fix it all came along--

"We lost Natasha," he said, the memories hazy, slipping away even as he tries to hold onto them. "And Pepper arrived with her daughter because...something was wrong with...Galaxia..." No, wrong name. Not 'Galaxia' but-- " _Nebula._ Nebula was different--" Not herself. Someone else. Or...someone she no longer was?

And even once they realised--

_The path that you would choose shatters Time itself. I cannot allow it._

Now Steve remembers the bald woman. Dressed like a monk, and white - definitely not one of the Dora Milaje. And her gaze was a judgement and they were all found wanting.

"She said the memory might not hold," Okoye admits. "Among the stronger-willed."

Maria snorts. "Did she not realise that was _all of them_?"

"But I'm right, aren't I?"

"Yes." Okoye stares back at him with the disconcerting frankness of the Wakandans. Like she has the right to hold Steve's eye. Which she does. He's just...not used to it. She heaves a sigh. "This is not an explanation that will be given to everyone. But some must know. And there will be questions."

"Why not give it to everyone? Why keep it hidden?"

There is a part of Steve that knows he's being stubborn and rebellious. That not everyone needs to know that the world ended. That this is something that is better off unknown, however heavy the secret.

"Because you remember what it was like the first time around," Okoye says fiercely. "But you do not remember the pain and the panic and the struggle as we here in Wakanda experienced it. You do not remember how we picked up the slack - how Natasha and Rhodey picked up what was broken and carried on when you and the others ran away from your pain."

_Natasha. Rhodey._ The way she speaks of them, the names she uses - familiar and friendly - it hits Steve then in a scramble of half-remembered moments. Grief and emptiness. The frustration of realising that Thanos had destroyed the stones. Trying to hold it all together. Fixing what he could. Giving up when it grew too much. And the call to try to bring it all back - and Tony, standing stubbornly in the way because he had a life that was worth living, with a wife he loved, and a daughter he wanted to keep.

Grimly, Steve remembers a moment facing Tony when he'd thought, _I never got any of that, why should he?_ Then shame had gutted him, and he'd agreed with Tony that they'd bring everyone who Thanos destroyed into the present--

"Tony's daughter," he says, urgently. "Did she--? Did you?"

Maria's eyes widen. it looks like Okoye hasn't reached that part of the story yet.

"Yes," Okoye says, adding no explanation.

Abruptly Steve remembers Pepper turning up at the facility with Morgan in tow. _Because I know you, Tony. And I know the Avengers._

Pepper would never have countenanced the erasure of her daughter. So the little girl with her father's sharp, clever gaze is here, somewhere, now living in a world that wasn't made for her existence the way the other one was. She's out of place, out of time, out of space - at least, insofar as the universe is concerned.

Steve knows how that feels.

"So it's a secret. But you're telling Maria."

He doesn't mean to make it sound quite so much like he thinks Maria shouldn't be told. The coolness that veils Maria's expression suggests he failed.

"What is your saying?" Okoye asks. "When the parade of heroes passes by, someone must clean up the streets afterwards?"

"It's not a saying," Maria murmurs.

"That makes it no less true." The flash of Okoye's teeth has a wicked gleam to it. "Commander Hill and General Fury are well-respected for dealing with the aftermath of such situations, even in Wakanda. And the King was insistent that we engage someone trusted to ensure that the details were seen to." She turns to Maria. "And you will accept?"

Maria hesitates, and although she doesn't look at Steve, he knows that she's hesitating over him.

"I think that I'd like to talk to Maria first," he tells Okoye, who lifts an eyebrow in amused question at Maria.

"I'll take it," Maria says, pointedly ignoring him.

Okoye's smile is satisfied. "I thought you would." She starts to say something else, then pauses, pressng finger to her earring with the distracted expression of someone taking a call.

"I wasn't going to tell you what you could and couldn't do," Steve starts, because if he doesn't say it now, he's not sure she'll let him--

"This is not the time--" 

Maria breaks off as Okoye drops her hand and looks to them. "The King requires my presence. We will speak of this later, yes?"

"Considering you haven't yet reached the part about Tony's daughter," Maria says after a moment's discombobulation, "yes."

Okoye grins. "You will have to ask the Captain to fill you in." Then she says something in Wakandan, which Steve doesn't get, but Maria clearly does, because she glares as the other woman lifts her hands and her shoulders in a gesture that is distinctly, _Not my problem,_ and walks away.

Maria looks like she's contemplating just walking away, too, but she turns to face Steve with something like a grimace. "What do you want?"

"I missed you." He watches the colour flush her cheeks, her gaze dropping away.

"It's been five years," she says, a little stiffly. "For you, anyway."

"That doesn't change that I missed you." He wants to touch her cheek, wants to wrap his arms around her. But that's not how they do things - not how they did things, even when they did things. And Steve has no words to bring her back - none that she'll listen to, anyway. Wasn't that the problem in the first place?

For a while, he'd thought that maybe it was him - that he was the problem. And maybe he was, but it wasn't all on him either. He's had five years of therapy to work through that, and a trip into the past to look at what he could have had, what might have been...

He's lost so much.

He doesn't want to lose this, too - or, at least, he doesn't dare let the opportunity pass him by. And if he doesn't make a move quickly, he'll lose this, too--

"Can we talk? After the clean up?"

For a moment, he thinks Maria's going to shut him down and walk away. But after a moment's hesitation, she exhales, and the fight goes out of her. "Later."

Steve knows better than to take her at face value. He puts out his hand as she starts to pass him, and when she stops, his hand is hovering over her shoulder. He lifts it slowly to brush her cheek, even though he can't feel her skin through the glove. He just wants to touch her, to know she's real. Now isn't the time and here isn't the place, but he needs this contact - as badly as Nat needed the contact.

Maria is here and real and present, not dust and ash and bitter memory.

"Don't run away this time," he adds, because he wouldn't put it past her to put him off until she's gone. "Please?"

The quick skid of Maria's gaze off to the side says he read her intent correctly, but although her mouth twists a little, this time she meets his gaze and nods. "Okay. I won't."

**Author's Note:**

> I may have cheated. They are not _quite_ making up in this story.


End file.
